Super! Family! Fun! Time!

We went to the Children's Festival today. Good times. There was a Cirque de Soleil style show geared towards little ones (and wide-eyed parents, too - for serious, people should not be able to put their legs that far over their heads or hold themselves up using only their teeth). Lots of crafts and activity tents and music, too.

The Art Garden.

Trying out a new toy (which promptly turned into a light sabre).


The Canadian Consulate had a booth!

*sniff sniff* Makes me homesick.

But of all the activities we did, the kids liked this one the best:

The Boy still can't stop talking about his "TWO scoops."

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Vendredi V - Black Is the New Black Edition

You have perhaps noticed that I wear black somewhat often. Like, a whole lot. To the tune of my coworkers commenting when I wear a different colour (two days in a row last week! It's a record! Must be spring fever). It's become such a trademark that when The Girl makes a drawing for me, she uses lots of black because "it's your favourite colour, mom, right?"

To some, black is, at best, a good accent colour or a sensible (albeit boring) colour for a go-to pair of pants. At worst, it's a drab, ordinary choice that simply cannot compete with the lavendars, fuschias, and chartreuses of the world. But to me, all that is hogwash as I revel in:

Top 5 Reasons Why I Wear Black All the Time:

1. It suits my vibe. Nothing says "I'm a nerdy semi-colon-loving hater-of-change with technological disabilities who approaches life with paranoid suspicion and a mental red pen" like an all-sable, all-the-time wardrobe. Of course, the same could be said of the-world-is-darkness-wanna-be-goth-chicks or an Earls waitress. But in my case, the cut is different.

2. It hides stains. Given that I end up wearing portions of everything I eat due to a spectacular lack of coordination, a black wardrobe actually lasts longer than any other colour, since evidence of last week's Chipotle quietly joins those of weeks prior and no one is the wiser. Chalk dust was always a problem, though.

3. It is the colour of lots of other awesome things. Like black beans - way better than kidney and leave pinto in the dust! Coffee. My pay-as-you-go cell phone that costs me $7 a month because I never call anyone. Sharpies markers. Or fresh-ground black pepper - I've had a purse-sized pepper grinder on my Christmas list for awhile, but alas, The Husband doesn't take seriously my desire for being able to whip out my own personal supply at will. See item #1.

4. It makes shopping dead easy. I'm in and out of the store in 10 minutes flat because my search is restricted to noir. Of course, this does frequently result in me asking The Husband if he likes my new shirt/skirt/pants/dress and he says, "it's new?" But each item is unique to me, and I mourn each one's loss as though it were the only one.

5. It makes me feel stylish. None other than that great fashion icon Audrey Hepburn advised "you should always wear two colours, and one of them should always be black." (Fun fact: Audrey Hepburn had size 10 feet - if you don't believe me, check out the wedding scene in Funny Face. She and Fred Astaire pretty much don't even need that raft on the picturesque creek as they sail into the sunset - if she can make wookie-girl feet look awesome, so can I!) And this is advice I follow frequently. Of course, I leave out the whole "other colour" most of the time, and just stick to charcoal.

Ooo, I thought of one more. Bonus entry:

6. It allows me to keep my job. I have to get up at 5:00 am most weekdays, and coherent choosing of clothes is not something of which I am capable that early. Or most people: you should see what everyone else is wearing when I manage to catch the 5:55 bus. When everything's black, it all matches, and as long as I make sure to grab both a top and a bottom, I'm good to go.

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Who Do You Think You Are? (Or: I Love Ice Cream!)

Ordinarily I'm a novel girl, myself.

It probably started back in grade one, when I was given the burgeoning-nerd's equivalent of a Golden Ticket: admittance into the "big kids" section in the school library. While the rest of my class was stuck reading the Little Mr. and Miss oeuvre (lovely in its own right), I sailed smugly past them, down the forbidden stairs and straight into Chapter Book Land.

Learning to read was probably the most explosive thing that has ever happened to me in that nothing before or since has fostered such continual transformations of my worldview. It was tremendously freeing, and I quickly grew addicted to the high of literary escapism. I'm still teased for blowing off a friend "because I was too busy reading," and I can't actually remember the summer between grades two and three except for the sound of flipping pages.

If reading was my vice, then novels (or their chapter-book-predecessors) were my drug of choice. Their quality was irrelevent; whether it was E. Nesbitt or Ann M. Martin, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or Sweet Valley High, it was all devoured with equal enthusiasm.

(Except for autobiography. There were a few years around junior high when I loathed anything first person. This made I Am David excrutiating in grade eight. That and the fact that it was taught by Miss McKay, who also taught me Phys. Ed. I'm sure that every time she opened her mouth about the protagonist's motivation I expected her to make me do push-ups.

Of which I could do four at the time. But I'm up to seven now, so maybe I should give the book another shot, too.)

It's not surprising that I majored in English, nor that I ended up gravitating toward the novel. Sure, I did my time with poetry. But poetry is kind of like an extra thick milkshake from BDI. If you try to just sip from the top, you only get the watery, melted stuff and it gets all over your face. You have to go deep - all the way to the bottom - with a straw that concentrates your efforts. But it's super hard work cuz it's so very thick. And rich - too much of it and you just feel sick.

Plays were pretty great, too, especially ol' Will. But they're like a chocolate dip - you have to break through the outer shell of characters and plot and jesting to get to the real stuff underneath, and sometimes it's too tempting to just eat the chocolate and not go any further.

But, ah, novels. They of the long story arc, in-depth characterization, narrative structure, cohesion. The more complicated the better - hence the specialization in Victorian Lit, I guess.

[I suspect this is why Middlemarch is my favourite book ever. Doesn't get much more novel-y than that. I remember a teaching colleague striding into the staff room and asking incredulously, "You assigned them MIDDLEMARCH?! Are you crazy?" D*mn straight. They're the better for having read it. Even if they don't think so. In fact, the world would be a better place if everyone read it. You can bet your bottom dollar there wouldn't be a recession right now if all those bankers had considered the object lesson of Fred Vincy. And five bucks says we wouldn't be in Iraq if someone understood the inter-connectedness of humanity like Eliot.]

Novels are the Goog of literature. (For the uninitiated, a Goog is a BDI special: a blueberry milkshake topped with bananas, an upside-down hot fudge sundae, peanuts, whipped cream, and a cherry.) They've got everything! The richness of the ice cream and the lightness of the fruit. The sticky sweetness of the fudge and the crunchy saltiness of the peanuts. There's a different variety in each bite, each chapter.

The one type of literature I just couldn't quite do was the short story. Sure, I read my Chekhov and Tolstoy like a good girl should. But short stories just seemed like kids' vanilla cones with sprinkles. Good and all, but no real depth once you got past the maddeningly few bright spots. Plain, simple, and ultimately not enough to do much more than whet your appetite.

Then I discovered Alice Munro.

I read her first in university, and was extremely taken by her easy, deceptively-simple style. She writes about ordinary people in seemingly ordinary ways. At first, you think it's a vanilla cone. But then, you realize, you've just been focused on the whipped cream. There be peanuts underneath. And hot fudge. And echoes of blueberry milkshake, subtle but distinctive. In truth, her stories are mini-Googs.

But what really made me love her was when I read her introduction to Selected Stories:

I did not "choose" to write short stories. I hoped to write novels. When you are responsible for running a house and taking care of small children, particularly in the days before disposable diapers or ubiquitous automatic washing machines, it's hard to arrange for large chunks of time. A child's illness, relatives coming to stay, a pile-up of unavoidable household jobs, can swallow a work-in-progress as surely as a power failure used to destroy a piece of work in the computer. You're better to stick with something you can keep in mind and hope to do in a few weeks, or a couple of months at most. [...] I took to writing in frantic spurts, juggling my life around until I could get a story done, then catching up on other responsibilities. So I got into the habit of writing short stories."

How can you not love a woman who admits that she has to fit her creativity in between the spin cycle and after-school snacks? This, I can understand. I can barely squeeze out a few blog posts now and again, much less an entire story. A novel is utterly out of the question (although I have been known to while away pleasant hours imagining how chagrined Oprah will be when I pull a Franzen and decline to be in her Book Club. Is she still doing that? Don't tell me if she isn't - you'll destroy the daydream. Wait, do tell me - it would make my heart happier knowing that millions of women are now being given the freedom to choose for themselves what goes in their bookbags).

Alice Munro writes about the things that matter most - people loving one other, hating one other, being petty with one other, being gracious with one other. Her characters are so human that they don't suffer from the relative lack of description they receive. In some ways, it's hardly escapist literature at all, so close to home it is - it feels effortless and ordinary, yet it stays with you long after you've moved on to the next story.

I was absolutely thrilled to read this week that Munro has won the Man Booker International Prize. It's so incredibly well-deserved, and I smile thinking about the readers who will now hear of her and find out how lovely her works are for themselves.

So, summer is upon us, everyone - march out to the Jake Epp Library or your favourite online bookstore and get yourself some Munro! Treat yourself to some mini-Googs on me.

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Say Thankya

They were the lucky ones, and on some level every one of them knew it...which was luckiest of all.

~ S. King, The Dark Tower

I struggle with being grateful. Not because I'm not, or that I don't have reason to be. Far from it - sometimes it's the recognition of just how much I have that prevents me from being able to acknowledge it.

I don't know if it's just that same old liberal white (Mennonite?) guilt talking or what. Maybe I still labour under the impression that good things come to the deserving (in which case, somebody's got some fairly rose-coloured glasses when it comes to tallying up the marks on my moral report card). Maybe I struggle with the knowledge that the rain falls on the good and the bad, seemingly without any sense of order (in which case, why me?).

Sometimes it's just misguided (and ultimately useless, really) self-defense: if I don't acknowledge how much something means to me, then it's less of a target. Or it won't hurt so much if it's taken away.

Regardless of why I do it, I do believe that when I withhold thanks, I spurn the Giver. Saying "thank you" honours the gift and the spirit in which it was given. It humbles the recipient, who is forced to acknowledge a connection with (if not a dependence upon) someone other than herself.

All this to say that in the past few weeks, I have found myself becoming increasingly grateful. I don't deserve any of this, any more than the homeless clown who begs for money as I pass him on my way home from work deserves to have been let go from the circus.

[Not a metaphor. He sits on Nicollet Mall wearing floppy shoes and the saddest clown make-up I have ever seen.]

In a land of mounting job losses, I have employment I love. Surrounded by foreclosures, I live in a comfortable home. With the cruel hands of Illness and Death knocking too often at the doors of those I love, our family gets away with the odd asthma puffer and carrying an epi-pen.

Although I'm woefully unprepared and most days fall entirely short of the mark, I get to be "Mom" to two kids of such splendidiferousness that I have to catch my breath sometimes when I look at them.

Despite having been to hell and back (or, perhaps, because of it), my husband and I talk idly about retirement planning or upcoming vacations where once there was no shared future.

And all this is but a taste of what's to come when we finally can run headlong Further Up and Further In.

It's a golden life of such wealth that I understand what it means to have an embarrassment of riches. I'm tempted to feel ashamed, to look down and shuffle my feet a bit. Or somehow minimize its grandeur by complaining about the little things (oh, they are so little).

Today I can't. Today I need to be thankful, unabashadly grateful, no hedging.

To the Great Giver of the Great Good: Thank you.

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It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's...

Dad, can I borrow Mom's black rubber gloves?

Uh, why?

So I can be a superhero.

Uh, okay.

[...]

Dad, can you tie this blanket around me?

Sure.

[...]

Dad, can you put Hammie in my back pocket?

Okay.

"Hammie": Hamster Wonder and Sidekick Extraordinaire

Off to save the world

BatKid in action

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Vendredi V - Kiddie Love Edition

During our nightly snuggle yesterday, The Boy informed me that his teacher had encouraged them to practice the things they are good at.

"And I'm good at making farting noises with my armpit!" he exclaimed, and proceeded to give me an exuberant demonstration.

Aside: This is, in fact, the truth, and that's not just parental pride talking. The other night we were on a family bike ride in the neighbourhood, and we passed some kids who ride the bus with The Girl and The Boy. An older boy looked up, nodded solemnly at The Boy, raised his hand as if to salute, and brought it swiftly under his arm to make busy farting noises. The Boy silently nodded an acknowledgement, and the two were well met.

A further aside: Despite his prowess, there is room for improvement. The other day The Boy informed me breathlessly with shining eyes that "there's this boy in swimming class and when he gets sweaty enough, he can make farting noises Behind. His. KNEES!" Ah, to what heights can one aspire!

So it got me thinking about all the things my kidlets do well each day. Not in a "they're awesome at driving me around the bend" or "their ability to whine is unsurpassed." Nope, this is the real deal, the stuff you save for the grandparents because they can handle the bragging. And, apparently, so can you:

Top 5 Things My Kids Are Good At:

1. Playing Imaginatively. My kids are living proof that lots of television does not equal a degredation of the imagination. Despite plenty of time in front of the boob tube, when we turn it off, their imaginations kick right into high gear and the costumes come out. We've had carnivals, spas, libraries, rocketships, schools, elaborate scooter obstacle courses, and many children-shaped pets. All of this in the past two months, too.

2. Wearing Their Hearts on Their Sleeves. This one makes me wince a little, because it's tough to see your little ones heading out each day wearing their vulnerability like a target. But the alternative to seeing every thought flit across their faces or sharing in the roller coaster ride that is life in grade school is to be shut out by premature independence. When they lay their bleeding, anguished hearts at my feet and look up at me with tear-filled, mournful eyes that plead help me, I feel like I'm being presented with a most incredible gift.

3. Turning Our House into Comedy Central. A lot of you comment that the munchkin stories on here make you laugh. Honey, you don't know the half of it. I make a conscious effort to exclude any stories that I think will someday embarass them or hinder them in their goal of taking up residence at 24 Sussex Drive (because, of course, the plan is to send them to Laval University - yay for cheap tuition! - where they will meet nice Canadian partners and they'll settle in Ottawa and finally put an end to the Two Solitudes and make the Liberal Party a force to be reckoned with again and I'll be so proud when they take their oaths of office in their back-to-back terms and be so glad I didn't post that story on my blog because, phew boy, if the Canadian voting public only knew....).

4. Making Everything Old New Again. Due to limited life experience, stuff that's old and tired for their parents is astonishingly exciting to our kids. When they learned "why did the chicken cross the road," you would have thought Jon Stewart had come to live with us, such was the laughter. Watching The Princess Bride over the weekend with The Girl made me remember how much of my heart I gave to Wesley as a teenager. And you don't even know how close my heart was to bursting last week when The Girl finished reading The Wizard of Oz.

5. Transforming the Mundane into the Extraordinary. Again because the novelty of life hasn't worn off yet, and also because they have virtually no control over their lives, my kids see the world as a magical place where anything can happen. Like last week, when I was craving a Blizzard and The Husband was away, I suggested we head to DQ after supper. They looked at each other with a combination of nervousness and slyness: "holy smokes, does she NOT REALIZE it's the middle of the week and we NEVER go out to a restaurant on a Tuesday night and we're TOTALLY not going to clue her in and we're GOING TO GET FREAKING BLIZZARDS!" I want to live in a world like that, where wizards are real and awesome equals a pirate ship in the hotel pool and where ice cream might be hidden just around the bend.

Actually, with them around...

I already do.

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Vendredi V - Bill Gates (and Early!) Edition

You're getting your VV love early this week because I'm on a roll (two weeks now!) and I figured it was a shame to end the streak just because we're going away for the weekend.

Off to Fargo for some early May Long-ing for this family. Ohhhhh yeah...the awesome metropolis that is Fargo. I've been getting the strangest looks when I tell people where we're going. But then I tell them I'm meeting some Canucks there, and their consternation clears. Apparently being Canadian explains away the crazy.

[Aside: I totally milk that. "Oh, that's not how we do it in Canada." As in: six-week unpaid maternity leaves, pay-as-you-go healthcare, leaving out the U in words because of laziness, and so on.]

So I got a new computer at work last week. Any of you who have ever done a computer transfer knows what a pain it is, particularly as deadlines don't take "but I had to spend 8 hours trying to get everything set up!" as a valid excuse.

Given my technological disability, these things tend to go beyond annoyance and well into the realm of bringing my life to a bleeding, crashing halt. Although, having spent years dealing with the fact that a mere touch from me will crash the most sturdy of systems, I've gotten used to more IT visits than your average bear. So no surprise that I got the laptop with the loosey-goosey hard drive that gives me the black screen of "Hard Drive Not Found" every time I breathe on it.

Anyway, to add to the nastiness, I've had to switch over to Office 2007. We actually did a trial run of this product at our house, which lasted for about four minutes and ended with "THIS IS TERRIBLE! GET IT OFF NOW! I CAN'T STAND IT!!" Which may or may not have been me.

Of course, ranting about how much I hate change doesn't exactly fly at the office, so I've been trying to grin and bear it. Tough stuff, given that stoopid "ribbon" at the top of Word and how nothing is where it is supposed to be and all the rounded corners and having to download compatability patches and how Adobe doesn't work with it and all sorts of blech.

But speaking of grinning, The Husband tells me that if I don't stop whining and complaining on here, I will lose readers. That may be "reader" singular, so I figure I'd best come up with some Pollyanna around here.

And so, after what must be the longest segue ever:

Top 5 Things I Like About Office 2007

1. The to-do-list/upcoming appointment bar on Outlook 2007. No more flipping over to my calendar to confirm that I have no life!

2. [...]

3. [...]

4. [...]

5. [...]

Aaaaaand, I'm out.

Yes. It really is that bad.

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Things Fall Apart...

...the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned...

Why yes, The Husband is travelling again, how on earth did you guess?

He's back in Canadaland again. I get so jealous knowing that his ingredients listed on his cereal box tomorrow morning will be bilingual.

And me? Halfway to Crazy Town, and it hasn't even been 24 hours yet.

I don't know know why things seem to go so swiftly and so immediately straight into the crapper. Goodness knows I used to do this all the time, juggling full-time mom responsibilities with full-time employee responsibilities. Just seems harder these days for some reason.

Probably because it's sporadic. After a few weeks of this, I'm sure everything would be running smoothly and we'd get into the groove. But when it's only a few days, we spend the entirety of it like those finches my younger brother used to have that my older brother absolutely hated. Yenno would wait until Chinkle Chapstick Lunchbox (note: these were their actual nicknames - and you thought Peitricia Mae was weird) wasn't around, and then he'd take a ruler and ram it repeatedly between the bars of their cage. Not to hurt them, but just to stop that constant cheerful squawking.

It worked for awhile in that there were a few seconds of silence, but then all finch-craziness would break loose and it was all flapping and feathers and avian rioting...

Today was still on the "okay" side of "how are you managing, you poor dear girl?" The Boy went to a crepe-making party after school (hee! I love French Immersion) and The Girl had a playdate. Then frozen pizza and off to swimming lessons.

Husband-less as I am, I told them we'd have to come home for our post-pool showers. They pleaded with me to let them shower there. Obviously: who wouldn't want to shower in mildewing, dim, damp open-to-everyone shower stalls in a crumbling locker room in a local high school when the alternative is our bright, clean, always-enough-hot-water-and-actual-pressure shower.

So I sent them, reminding The Boy that I couldn't go into the boys changeroom with him and he would need to ask for help to turn the shower on and off and to put his bag off to the side and to...

"Okay, Mom, I KNOW!"

(Yup, a healthy dose of belligerence today, too, for some reason. Must've been too many crepes.)

Ten minutes later, I was wondering if I should poke my head into the changeroom with my hand covering my eyes or ask the man next to me if he would be willing to go see if my son was okay when The Boy emerged looking rather worse for the wear and dragging his bag on the tiles.

"That was a BAD shower," he announced. "My towel got wet and my pajamas got wet and I HAVE NO UNDERWEAR!"

Well, he did have underwear. He just couldn't find it at the bottom of his bag. Because it was covered by his towel. Which was currently entirely swollen with about two gallons of water. Because he had brought the entire kit and kaboodle into the shower with him.

Who could possibly have seen that coming?

Ah well. Best get me off to bed. I need to cram 8 hours of work into 5 and a half hours in the office and working from home while the kids are awake is dicey, so the plan is to log in at 5:30 am and get through a couple of hours before I have to reach for bleary-eyed children and non-bilingual cereal boxes. Who am I kidding - the spirit is willing, but this flesh'll be lucky if it gets to the coffeemaker by 6:30.

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How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways

I've mentioned several times here before that my favourite piece of punctuation is the semicolon. But it seems to me that I've been remiss in elaborating on the object of my affection and just why it is I find this little mark so intensely attractive.

Honestly, I'm surprised none of you have asked, although perhaps its charms are obvious, or perhaps you have feared the boredom that so oft accompanies tales of a beloved from an enamoured lover, in which their love affair is the most passionate, most intimate, most heavenly that ever existed - just like every other one.

Nonetheless, the tale of our coming together bears telling. In many ways, it's the old story - girl meets punctuation mark, they fall in love, they have a falling out after a misunderstanding, and then, brought together again, they ride off into the sunset.

I'm not sure when I started using it; it was probably in high school that it began to appear in my essays. Soon, my papers were littered with it, and we were young and foolish and in love.

Then, a wedge where once it seemed no crack could be - a second-year university paper returned, filled with green circles highlighting each instance of my beloved, and the fateful comment: Your use of the semicolon is incorrect.

Betrayed! Not only by high school English teachers who failed to instruct me in the ways of the punctuation world, but by the very mark with which I lavished my work. How could it rest there so easily and so silent while so clearly aware of my error?

We parted ways for some time after that. I was angry at the part it played in eliciting a grade of less than an A (on an English paper, no less!); it was hurt by my swift abandonment and the solace I found in the easy and welcoming arms of the comma.

But despite thinking I'd moved on, I kept thinking about it. Seeing it in other places, jealous of the way others seemed to use it so effortlessly.

So I became the bigger person, swallowed my pride, and finally learned how to use the darned thing. And started doing just that.

We moved slowly at first; both chastened and burned by the ill-advised yet intense passion of our first encounters, we were unsure of what our new relationship would look like. But hesitancy gave way to that easy understanding that comes with years of intimacy, caution became comfort, and it has since become my dearest punctuation partner.

Here's why: when it comes to connection, the semicolon is unmatched. Semicolons connect two independent but related clauses. In other words, like marriage at its very best, the semicolon takes two individuals and bonds them while maintaining them as distinct beings.

Observe:

My kids are whining. They don't want to clean up the Lego.

My kids are whining, for they don't want to clean up the Lego.

My kids are whining; they don't want to clean up the Lego.

The first example does the job, but it's choppy. Across the pond, they call the period a "full-stop," which I think is a much better description of its effect. "Period" suggests a simple pause, but in reality, this mark requires a reader who is cruising along to stop abruptly and look both ways before stepping on the gas again.

The second example allows the reader to keep going, but it's cumbersome. A comma joining independent clauses demands the use of a conjunction, an extra word serving to join the two sentences together. Plus, this is where danger lies: too many writers, either lazy or still under the impression that a pause invariably equals a comma, leave out the conjunction, leading to that fatal error - the comma splice.

But the third, ah, the third example is a picture of elegance. The two sentences remain distinct, but they are joined nonetheless, sweetly and by the simplest of marks. The semicolon inserts a brief pause without the jarring effects of the full-stop, while simultaneously speaking of promise: Reader, there is more to come, once you have caught your breath.

The semicolon is often described as being a "combination of a period and a comma." Although prosaic, this definition speaks truth. Like the period, the semicolon signals closure and gives the dignity of finality to the preceding clause; however, at the same time, like the comma, the semicolon beckons the reader on, softening any end-of-clause harshness.

The period, all business with its judge's gavel-like stamp of termination. The comma, all pleasure with its sassy swirl and its crooked come-hither finger. Brought together into punctuational perfection.

And that, my friends, is why I love the semicolon.

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Vendredi V - Stay Awake, Don't Rest Your Head Edition

Fresh off another night of cat herding getting the kids to bed (with bonus craziness after The Boy's kindergarten-palooza concert last night), I'm struck again by how much my kids hate going to bed.

Now me? I love my bed. Although, to be fair, I do go there somewhat reluctantly when there's a book to be read (which is pretty much always), so I suppose I can see where they're coming from a bit. But I will say that I do not protest or whine or complain or beg for one more thing (unlike some other people I know). If I did, I could learn from the pros:

Top 5 Excuses My Children Have For Not Going to Sleep:

1. "But I don't have Mom Teddy/Hammie the Hamster/Vicks for my nose/my lullabies/my snuggle/ice in my water!" (Yeah, I'll admit I go get these things, as these are fairly painless compared to the intricate ritual we used to have to go through with The Girl when she was three which involved Big-Tuck-Small-Tuck-Big-Kiss-Small-Kiss-Big-Hug-Small-Kiss-Kiss-All-the-Teddies-in-Turn-Take-Imaginary-Pictures-of-Everyone.)

2. "But my legs hurt...I need a hot water bottle!" (This one gets me too. I used to get terrible growing pains - no surprise for a girl whose nickname was "Wookie Girl" in high school - so there's a lot of sympathy.)

3. "But I just have to finish this chapter!" (Oooo, she *knows* my weakness. Awash in fond memories of "one last chapter" past, I mumble something about "turn off the light when you're done" and leave her in peace. This weakness does not extend to "finish this level" or "finish this part of my drawing," so until The Boy learns how to read, it's Enforcer Mom for him.)

4. "But it's still light outside!" (Much as I love the longer days of late, they wreak havoc on bedtime. Winter darkness = awesome, especially when kids can't tell time, as you can have 'em in bed by 7:30 if they need it and they're none the wiser. With light blasting through those blinds, I have to come up with explanations about how Mr. Sun likes the warmer weather and is also reluctant to go to bed.)

5.  "But, Dad, he hasn't even heard about Clayface yet!" (This was the best one ever, delivered in a wail by The Boy when we tried to shut down a sleepover chit chat with a little boy whose parents keep him away from superhero stuff and who is, as a result, rabid to hear about every single detail of Lego Batman from our son.)

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There's a New-Fangled Com-Pyoo-Ter, But Otherwise, Place Looks the Same

We got a library at our house this weekend. The Girl took her books and categorized them. She labelled the shelves and distributed the books by section.

Our household was invited to sign up for library cards, and we could all choose books to borrow for three weeks.

(Her calm librarian's exterior was quite ruffled when no one came to the library, even though I protested that I had come twice to get books. She mournfully lamented that no one cares about libraries anymore these days, and restricted the borrowing period to three hours to try to drum up some more traffic.)

Now replace "this weekend" with "the Peitash house circa 1983" and "The Girl" with "Peitricia Mae" and you've got a fairly accurate picture of some golden moments in my childhood.

Seriously, the only difference is that her library is part of the computer age and we swipe our cards instead of waiting for the librarian to painstakingly write out our due date slips.

She's even got the same books in there, for goodness' sakes, as I've hung onto most of my favourites from those days. There Pippi, Five Little Peppers, and The Boxcar Children, for a start.

This certainly isn't an isolated case. I've seen lots of make-believe games from my past resurrected, usually without any prompting from me. Playing school runs in our DNA, and directing plays seems to be part of the gene pool.

It's spooky sometimes, how much she's like me. From the reading to the irrationality, the long body that ensures clothes are either too short or too wide to the love of routine that leaves us both whining if someone springs a schedule change on us. In some ways, it's great - I can understand what drives her and I know what will push her over the edge.

At the same time, parenting a mini-me presents a lot of challenges. I'm far too quick to impose my own limitations on her, assuming that just because I can't handle something, she won't be able to either. (Hello, swimming lessons!) I far too often try to step in between her and The Husband when I think that he's pushing her too hard because I hate being pushed. But lo and behold, a little push and she's often on her way.

Speaking of pushed, here's my not-mini-me, demonstrating just how very unlike his mother he is by embracing one of life's challenges. The Girl, no surprise, has yet to accomplish this feat.

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Battle of the Bicycles

I hate going fast. So very much.

I'm the first person to stomp on the brakes in the car if it feels like we're taking a corner too quickly (even if I'm in the passenger seat), and I keep my feet firmly outstretched whenever I'm on a toboggan (which, if I ever am on one, is The Last Time I'm Letting You Talk Me Into This) so that I can immediately put a stop to any hint of careening toward a tree.

[Aside: I also hate wearing a bathing suit. And getting water in my nose. Which makes waterslides a trifecta of Pure Evil.]

So it probably comes as no surprise that one of the reasons I love my cruiser bike is because it does not go too fast. It's got great brakes - which see a good deal of use - and its steel frame and rudimentary gear system guarantee a low top speed.

But the main reason why I heart my bike is because it looks slow:

Ain't nothin' speedy about this baby. Look at her - all stylishly sedate. Nice big, comfy seat... a bell (purely for show - it's not like I'm passing anybody)... and a basket to hold important things like MomTeddy and Pokemon cards.

Sigh. I love this bike.

But The Husband does not.

Oh, it was fine when we lived in Winnipeg. As in middle-of-the-Prairies -can-see-the-horizon-for-eleven-miles Winnipeg. This bike's a cruiser and it's perfect for stately and leisurely rides up Wellington and through Assiniboine Park.

But Minneapolis is a little bit hilly. Not Vancouver hilly, by any stretch, but we get our share of slopes here - a lot of up and down-ness.

(Which, if you ask me, is quite silly. Why should I go up and down like a sine wave when I end up at the same altitude as before?)

The oh-so-frequent declines are fine. It's the inclines that have caused some consternation. Not only can I not go fast up them, but I also somehow can't seem to go up them at all. As in, I have to get off my bike and walk it up.

The lack of gears - so much a part of who my bike is - renders family bike rides at best, difficult, and at worst, filled with anger and tears and complaining (mine) and frustration (The Husband's).

So he's been after me for awhile to get a new bike. One with lots of gears so he doesn't have to listen to my whining every time we hit a slope of more than one degree.

In theory, I was okay with this idea (although I did feel a tad Benedict Arnold-y - I've loved my bike for years, and at the first sign of mountainous trouble, I abandon it?). However, in practice, this quickly became a difficult prospect.

The problem lay in the fact that I have a very specific set of criteria for what constitutes a good bike: it must Look Good.

And by "Good," I mean it must look as though someone whose favourite piece of punctuation is a semi-colon owns it. It must have a basket. And a bell. And fenders. And a large-a$$ seat.

Above all, it must look slow.

So, it's been a bit of a battle. Lots of [whiny] "but I liiiiiike my bike"s countered with [frustrated] "but you never ride it and you hate going up hills and I hate hearing you complain all the time." Which is followed by [catty] "well, fine, then, you find me a bike that has gears AND Looks Good."

Shockingly, it is difficult to find a bike that has many gears that also looks slow. Anything fancy enough to have gears looks fancy - like its driver buys clothes at MEC and uses clipless pedals and owns a camelback. Anything that Looks Good is usually a cruiser (awesome!) with only five gears (exactly what I have now, so less awesome).

But after much searching and me rejecting almost everything he found ("look how fast that looks! It looks like a ten-speed or something!"), The Husband actually managed to find one that met the stringent requirements - mostly because he found biking blogs devoted to posting pictures of people looking cool on bikes [aside: seriously?!], and showed me ones with girls who looked suspiciously as though they love semi-colons riding this one:

It's a little diamond-in-the-roughy at this point - I need to swap over my bell and find a better basket than the one they had at the store. It's also missing some old-school headlight action.

But it's got 21 gears, which makes The Husband happy, and it looks Awesome, which makes PM happy. Everybody wins!

(Except the Cruiser. But I'll make sure to save my very slowest rides for it.)

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Vendredi V - The Grass Has Riz Edition

Just in time for spring, a resurrection of that former famed Friday Feature!

And it is indeed spring in Minnesota. I love this time of year, mostly because I know it's six months before I have to think about winter again. April is definitely not the cruellest month - it is, in fact, the Friday of months wherein the slog of the work-a-day winter is left behind for the weekend that is months-without-an-"R."

[Aside: did your mom have that rule? We were only allowed to wear shorts in months that did not have an "R" in their name. The poor Peitasch kids in April or September heat waves.....]

Anyway, the reminders that it's that time of year are everywhere:

Top 5 Signs It's Spring:

1.  The farmer's market has returned to Nicollet Mall downtown. Never mind that all of the produce is shipped in from elsewhere seeing as how there's no possible way that there's any locally grown stuff since there was snow on the ground two weeks ago. Nothing says spring like buying Mexican bananas on the street instead of at the grocery store!

2.  The buskers are out. Nobody can play the trumpet/saxophone/flute/tambourine/guitar when it's -40.  So nice to have everybody back to play the background music for my Mexican banana-buying.

3.  The panhandlers/homeless people are out. I always feel a bit happier (or, perhaps, slightly less sad) for homeless people in springtime. If I hate winter (I of such wealth that I can waltz from warm house to warm car to warm office), what do they feel about living in The Icebox of the Nation? I can't imagine how much it sucks to be homeless, but I imagine it sucks more when it's cold.

4.  My lawn needs mowing. Which is very exciting for me, since we have a lawn service and I get all the benefits of the smell of fresh cut grass without any of the actual cutting.

5.  Summer car. Love, love, love it when I get to my car in the afternoon and it's all stale and hot and sweaty in there.

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